Guilty pleasures of intellectuals

Tariq Ramadan listens to rap! Actually, I don’t see why this should be a guilty pleasure since I can see professional reasons for him to listen to this, what with needing to understand the lives of young European Muslims. Historically, after all, rap has been about expressing the discontent of a racial minority. So this one doesn’t seem as much of a guilty pleasure as the other stuff.

Slavoj Zizek enjoys military games! My favourite one. The documentary about him makes clear that he’s quite a character, but it never mentioned this particular hobby of his. But Zizek’s favourite game is something called Stalin Subway, where the player kills for Papa Joe? I seem to remember he has a portrait of Stalin in his entranceway. He claims he’s being ironic, but obviously he’s fascinated with the man. And look at what he said about military games:

“I play them compulsively, enjoying the freedom to dwell in the virtual space where I can do with impunity all the horrible things I was always dreaming of – killing innocent civilians, burning churches and houses, betraying allies… Plato was right: there are only two kinds of people on this earth, those who dream about doing horrible things and those who actually do them.”

Good thing he’s an academic, he’ll never have any power to tempt him. Oh, and the snarky comments from academics_anon can be amusing:

“Is it just me or does Catherine MacKinnon come off as the dour, unpleasant creature in real life that she seems to be in her books?”